Question of Reality
by Black Wolf-Dog
Summary: Before the island, Slade Wilson had a life beyond survival of the deadliest and he'd quite enjoyed it. But now, sitting in a jail cell in purgatory, that life is about to come back to face him, and question the man he's become. Mentions of previous Slade/OC, Slade/Shado One-Shot


**Disclaimer: Yeah, wish I did, but I don't own Arrow.**

_**Black Wolf-Dog: **This little plot bunny hit me while I was out camping and I couldn't focus on my other story without writing it. Originally this was supposed to be the end of a novel-like fic that explored how these two met, but I decided to see how well-received this piece would be before attempting to start another full-length story...and this was the only scene I really had planned out so I decided what the heck? and went for it :) Please let me know what you think!_

_I know in the show Slade states he was on the island for 264 days before they took the Amazo, but I read somewhere that his plane was shot down a year before Oliver shipwrecked, so that's the version I'm going with…because I can. :) Also I'm figuring each season covers about a year so Slade was on the island almost three years._

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Slade Wilson considered himself many things, and patient was certainly one of his mastered qualities. So was tactical planning, and he was making full use of those two skills as time slowly crawled by. This stint in maximum security purgatory was a simple inconvenience. Annoying, impeding to any sort of set-up to his new plans, but nothing more than inconvenient. There was no doubt in his mind he would escape from this place. Without the Mirakuru the timeframe of said escape was greatly lengthened, but it would not stop it. He would get out, he would get his revenge on Oliver and he certainly would not be underestimating one Felicity Smoak.

He kept track of every passing day by the meals ARGUS gave him. Two a day, through a seamless hatch in the ceiling. Though in true Waller fashion, a third was tossed in every now and then. A weak attempt to confuse him. He'd long ago mastered counting the hours; he always knew exactly which day it was.

The first weeks had been the worst. After so long with the Mirakuru, his body was going through shock without it. Muscles twitched and seized, hallucinations came fast and vivid but disappeared just as quickly. After a month, his system readjusted itself. The illusions started fading when he acknowledged them, so he stopped doing so. He'd lay on that hard cot, eye half open as he watched and listened to Shado in his peripheral. At two months, her figure started to fade, and at three, she stopped appearing all together. Oh he could still hear her voice, taunting him, demanding revenge, begging him to save her. It was maddening as much as it focused him on his planning.

Six months after Queen had left him to rot, the dull routine was broken. His breakfast had been dropped only three hours before and he was currently in the midst of rewriting that failing night in Starling when the heavy steel door creaked open. He didn't open his eye, refusing to let go of the beautiful image of his sword impaled through the IT tech and the kid broken at the sight of her body. Oh how he wanted nothing more in this world than that image to become real.

"Slade?" The female voice shattered his illusion faster than reality had.

It'd been two months since he'd had any sort of hallucination, and years since he'd even allowed _her_ to cross his mind. So he kept his eye shut and stayed unmoving on the cot, his body tense and coiled, ready to spring should this sick trick continue.

"Slade open your eyes." Her voice was still soft, but he could hear the edge plain as day. She didn't need to say she knew he was awake; she knew him—_had _known him—enough to know exactly when he was and wasn't pretending to be asleep.

No, she wasn't real. Nothing more than another attack on his sanity by his own mind. So he let out a dark chuckle as he allowed himself to go along with it for the time being, it always made them end faster. "I've only got one eye now, love."

Her temper spiked, and like every time before, he could _feel_ the glare she threw at him. She had been a potent woman and his mind seemed determined to make this vision as real as possible. "Then open your good eye and face me damn it!"

It was too much, not being able to see or hear Shado anymore was bad enough, but he couldn't take being taunted by her. So he turned to face the illusion, to be rid of it before he was tempted to remember her face.

"Lia." He let the old pet-name roll of his tongue before he'd even realized it as he took in his memory of her. The hallucination didn't fade; it was there in front of him, on the other side of the bars in perfectly timeless clarity.

No, that wasn't quite right. He frowned as he looked her over. This wasn't the woman he'd left behind; this wasn't his Lia just the way he remembered. This woman had her features, her voice, but her body had filled out more, lost some of the toned muscle and her dark hair was cut short. A new tattoo peaked out at him from her right shoulder, covering what would have been a scar from his sword. The woman before him was very real.

He sat up slowly, controlling every minuscule movement. This was a trick of some sort he knew, because there was no possibility. "You're dead."

Her blue eyes were hard, but he could see the struggle to hold it together behind them. "So are you."

She was close to the bars, almost leaned against them. He moved fast, charging and getting a harsh grip on her arm before she could move away. Not that she tried to, and it made him angry. _Everyone_ feared him!

"Prove it." He snarled. He'd kill everyone involved in this ploy, because he knew ARGUS had created this fraud to break him. And every last one of them would pay for it.

With her free hand she pulled the collar of her shirt down, revealing the small tattoo that rested over her heart. Crossed swords, his swords, his mark. Not even Waller had known of those particular swords; he'd left them on the Amazo. Perhaps he'd finally snapped and his mind was perversely torturing him.

"I saw you die." He stated in a gruff tone. He was done playing.

She cocked her head slightly, as if wondering how he'd seen such a thing but pulled her shirt a little further anyways. There, just past her heart, the scar of a bullet stood stark white against her skin.

"He missed." Was all she supplied. His grip loosened until it was almost a caress. He didn't want to believe, to risk the false hope only to have it shatter around him. But her skin against his callused hands, the differences, the tattoo, the scar in the exact place he'd seen the bullet rip through her body, it was almost too much to deny.

"What happened to you Slade?" She asked, ghosting her fingertips over the planes of his face. He was at war with himself. A part of him wanted to close his eye and wake up, but an equal part wanted, was desperate to stay dreaming, to drag it out for as long as possible.

His voice was rough as the past tried to burst back to the forefront of his mind. "The plane was shot down."

She shook her head, backing away. He refused to release his grip.

"I'm not talking about eight years ago." She motioned with the hand he didn't have hold of to their surroundings. "What happened in the years since that turned you into this?"

"I haven't changed."

She gave a rueful laugh, tugging at her captive hand, he held fast. "They call you Deathstroke, Slade. The man I knew put on that mask to protect his friends, not instill fear into innocent people."

"Innocent?" He let out a dark chuckle, "None of the men I went after were innocent!"

She dropped her gaze to his hand, squeezing her tight but not yet enough to bruise. "What about Oliver Queen? What did he do?"

The response was immediate. The second the name passed her lips the grip tightened, grinding together the bones in her hand.

"What did he do?" He growled, "He drove an arrow through my eye!"

He ripped the patch off, letting the grotesque hole show in all its glory. The woman flinched, but kept her gaze locked on his good eye.

"You were always an eye for an eye kind of man Slade, but an eye for a city?" Her voice dropped, and it was all the warning he got, "Who is Shado?"

His hand seized and ground the bones harder before he jerked away from her. It was a ram to the gut, hearing her name come from this woman, the two lives that were never meant to cross that he had believed ended in the same fate.

"You talked to Queen then." He ground out, pure contempt on his face for the man he had once called a brother.

Lia leaned against the bars of his cell. Even now, even knowing all he had done and was capable of, she wasn't afraid of him. "He's the one who told me where you were."

"And just what did he tell you?" Slade spat.

She cocked her head as she regarded him, "He told me that you save his life, trained him, that you were still the man I fell in love with. Until Shado and the Mirakuru. He explained what the drug did to your mind, after her death, and how you turned against him."

Slade raged, "He turned against _me_ when he killed her!"

"Then who was Ivo?" She challenged.

He growled, stepping forward before changing his mind and starting to pace like a caged lion. For a man who had always been so in control of himself, he was losing that here. Or perhaps he already had, and having the goal of vengeance had simply kept it from showing. "Ivo may have pulled the trigger, and he suffered for that, but Oliver pointed the gun!"

"So?" She cocked an eyebrow, "I seem to recall several instances where we aimed guns at each other and yet, here we are."

He snarled, changing his pace to a more controlled speed and keeping his body tipped towards her, like a predator waiting for the right moment to pounce. She knew it was a bluff, and she wasn't afraid to call him on it. "You were willing to sacrifice an entire city for a vendetta against one man. That makes you no better than Billy."

Slade lunged, slamming his fists against the bars. Even without the miracle drug enhancing his strength, the metal rang at the force of the impact. "I am nothing like him!"

Lia met his snarl with one of her own, "Betray a brother for your own selfish desires with no concern of casualties? You're the same!"

"I am avenging her death!"

"So kill the one who pulled the trigger and be done with it." She snapped, "The moment you target the bystanders you're nothing but another killer."

"He chose who to save, he sentenced her to die." There was a strong will to reach through the bars and strangle her for her insolence but the will just wasn't strong enough to raise his hand.

She snorted, "Do you really think Ivo would have spared Shado had he chosen differently? Ivo knew you were the strong link; you were the one he had to break if he wanted to win. You're the one who always said to kill the snake by cutting off the head. You were the head Slade, and Shado was always going to die."

He stepped away from her, grinding his teeth. "Why did you come here?"

She sighed, looking him in the eye and wondering, hoping, that the man she knew was still in there somewhere. "Because my fiancé was shot down eight years ago and I wanted to know if he could ever escape from this island or if Deathstroke had killed him to."

She turned and walked back towards the door, but just as she was about to go through it, he spoke, and his voice held a softness that was almost foreign on his tongue. "I'm right here Lia."

The woman glanced over her shoulder at him, took in the broken man before her, whose grief and anger had sunk its claws so deeply into and felt her own heart break a little more. "Ivo may have killed Shado, but you buried Slade Wilson with her. I hope for your sake that you can find him again, because the shell you've become doesn't suit you."

With that she walked out, letting the heavy steel door shut with a finality that let grief sink its claws back into her, and she found herself fighting tears the entire way back to the mainland.

As for Slade, no matter how hard he tried to plot in the months that followed, those words from that damn woman haunted him.

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**Wolf-Dog: **_I know it's not my best writing, but life has been hectic, my brain is fried and I just needed to spit this out. __Honestly this was just one of those scenes begging to be written and I am but a slave to the whims of my muse. So wa-la! My first one-shot! And any of those wondering about NRFTW, I'm terribly sorry! My muse has been abducted by Arrow and then deprived by my moving out of state. I'll also be starting uni very soon so I can't say when I'll really get the chance to update again. I am always trying to work back to it though! _

_Thanks for reading, please drop a review if you've got an opinion on it!_


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